When the vessel was first discovered last year, it contained the leg bone of a tapir, a medium-size mammal related to both the horse and the rhinoceros.

Rabinowitz hoped to find remaining pockets of additional charismatic fauna - elephants, tigers, and rhinoceroses - and to set up a biological reserve to protect them, but he soon learned that these large mammals had disappeared.

O'Connell-Rodwell and her colleagues have also begun to study the nuances of elephant signals to distinguish them from the footsteps of rhinoceroses or lions.

Origin

It is the look of the rhinoceros that provides its name, which comes from Greek rhino- ‘nose’ and keras ‘horn’. The animal has been known in English since the end of the 14th century, but the first reference to it calls it a kind of unicorn. Rhino- will be familiar to gardeners from the antirrhinum (mid 16th century), the alternative name for the snapdragon, whose name means ‘counterfeiting a nose’ from its appearance, while keras appears in keratin (mid 19th century), the substance from which horn is made.